Translated from Italian by Pina Piccolo. Cover art: The ghost of war, by Juan Esguerra.
Thank God you opened your mouth again, says she. You’ve been quiet as a mouse all morning. You go on reading your newspaper like I’m not even here, you’ve left the house twice without saying goodbye. And when you came back you didn’t even call out something like, “It’s me!” He barely even blinked at her complaints. Then he tells her, It wasn’t me who asked that question. Whose question is it, then? It just appeared. It appeared! what do you mean?
She is upset, he thinks, such bad mood in her voice. And also, why are we getting older? Also, there are fewer and fewer familiar faces here. Living ones. The other ones are outnumbering them.
When did that question appear? A fortnight ago, says he. Where? On that street near here. The shortcut you take to get to the bus stop for the 9. A hovering question, she says, waiting for passersby? No, that’s not it, it’s written on the wall of that abandoned warehouse, spray-painted. A lot of people write and draw what pops into their minds, she says, but it wasn’t like that before the war. It was like that before the war too, he says, but not to this extent, all over the place. Maybe so, and maybe we can’t really recall it, she says. Maybe, he repeats under his breath. I’ve been through there, too, at least twice recently, um, maybe three times, and I didn’t notice anything. It couldn’t be that you dreamed it? No, tomorrow you can easily go and check for yourself that it’s there, he says. Tomorrow? Yes, he says, tomorrow, but you can even go check this afternoon if you wish. I can do it even now! she shouts.
She leaves the house, in a hurry. He stays in the room. He stretches to reach the radio switch from the sofa, listens to the weather forecast for the second half of October. Then the news: today’s cabinet meeting (it was again a heated discussion), the war in Ukraine (a military strategist says that, for tactical reasons, it must last), a foreign bank (which has three branches in our country) going bankrupt, the national champions’ preparations for the game in Scotland (the opponent is worthy of respect), the awarding of a prestigious literary prize to a prestigious writer (who has already received several prestigious awards in the country, the region and Europe)…
They are demolishing the warehouse right now, she says as she enters the living room from the entrance, they close down the whole street even for pedestrians. He turns off the radio. They’ve left a narrow passageway for street residents only. I asked a woman, about our age, if she remembers the sentence written on the warehouse wall. Was that a warehouse? I was not born here, she said, the winds brought it to me, you know which ones. Anyway, she was surprised at my question. Then, as if she remembered something, she said that the wall was smeared with all kinds of writing. So she saw some other wall, he says. Uhm, I also asked a middle-aged man. He started shouting, I’m unemployed, let everyone write whatever they want! I asked someone else too, but a downpour broke out. Fortunately, the overcoat I wear in the fall has a hood. I didn’t realize it was raining, he says. Look, raindrops are still falling on the window panes. He gets up, walks over to the window. I don’t see any drops. Look, one, two, three, she says, sliding down. There are no raindrops! It’s not normal that you don’t see them, she says, go to the entrance and touch my overcoat.
Him? He has no intention of listening to her.
All right, she says, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to.
They look at each other, almost snout against snout.
She seems to hear his whisper, like a reed rustling against the water of that lake they once used to go to on Sundays. long ago, when that warehouse was not abandoned yet. Of the words he just murmured she has heard only three clearly.
How can you.
From the unpublished short story collection The Bracelet.
Born in Visoko, Bosnia, in 1956, Božidar Stanišic holds a degree in philosophy and worked as a teacher until 1992, when he fled the civil war that broke out in his country. He moved to Italy, where he still lives with his family. In 1993 he published I buchi neri di Sarajevo (MGS Press); in the following years he published three collections of poems Spring in Zugliano, Non-poems, Metamorphosis of Windows, then the collection of short stories entitled Three Short Stories. One of his pieces is featured in the anthology of Bosnian-Herzegovinian fiction of the 20th century Tales from Bosnia, edited by G. Scotti. He then resumed his prose production with Bon Voyage, The Winged Dog and other short stories. In 2011 he published the children’s book La cicala e la piccola formica, in 2012 Piccolo, rosso e altri racconti. He has various prose pieces and poems scattered in numerous Italian and foreign anthologies. Some of his short stories, essays and poems are translated into French, English, Slovenian, Albanian, Japanese and Chinese.
